A discourse shaped by the Vietnam War

PARIS — Wearing an elegant tweed jacket and sipping fruit juice in a Left Bank café here, the writer Duong Thu Huong hardly cuts a threatening figure. But Huong, 58, evidently does in her native Vietnam, where she has spent time in jail, has seen her books banned and for 11 years was denied a passport to travel abroad.

Her sins, it seems, are many. Her novels dissecting life under one of the last Communist regimes are published and well received in the West. She is a former Communist Party member who was expelled as a traitor. And above all, she is a dissident - a "dissident whore," one party leader said - who refused to be silenced even after spending eight months in prison in 1991.

Now, for the second time, she has been allowed to travel to Europe. But in a sense, Vietnam has traveled here with her. She is willing to talk about her life and to discuss her five novels, including her latest, "No Man's Land," published in the United States in April. But her priority is to denounce the Hanoi government as irremediably corrupt and abusive.

"It is my mission to do so on behalf of those who have died under this shameful regime," she said, speaking fluent but heavily accented French. "Because I have a small reputation abroad, I have to say these things. I have to empty what is inside me to feel my conscience is clear. The people have lost the power to react, to reflect, to think. Perhaps I will give people courage."

She feels her message is more urgent than ever. Thirty years after the Vietnam War, she sees the regime gaining acceptance abroad by opening up its economy to foreigners under a communism-with-capitalism strategy. She also noted with alarm that Vietnam's prime minister, Phan Van Khai, was received by President George W. Bush at the White House last month.

"It is a brutal and ignoble regime that does lots of things to fool foreigners," she said during a long conversation. "If Bush supports this regime, it will be engaging in another war that will drive the people into the mud. This time, instead of using B-52 bombers, it will be using the hands of native turncoats."

Until now, she went on, the Vietnam War served to justify the government's grip on power.

"All its propaganda is designed to feed the myth of the war, to flatter and threaten the people," she said. "It tells them: 'You are a heroic people. You should be proud of your history. But never forget that it was the party that led the people to victory.' It deceives the people with blind pride."

Huong's life, too, was inevitably shaped by the war. As a child, she said, she was refused a good education because she belonged to neither the peasantry nor the proletariat class: Her grandmother was a landowner who in the mid-1950s moved to South Vietnam. But at 16, Duong Thu Huong (pronounced zung tu hung) was allowed to join a nomadic theater troupe and, showing talent, was then sent to a college training actors, dancers and singers for popular entertainment.

There she again did well and in 1968 was offered the chance to study in the Soviet Union, East Germany or Bulgaria. "But I chose to go to the front because our country was at war and my ancestors have always fought for our country," she said. "I joined a group of young artists performing for the troops and victims of the war. The slogan was: 'Our songs are louder than the bombing.' We would silence the screams with songs."

But even then, she recalled, she noticed that party members enjoyed special privileges. A bigger shock followed when South Vietnamese prisoners arrived in her zone. "I discovered the truth that we were also fighting Vietnamese," she said. "Yes, we were being bombed all the time by the Americans, but they were high in the sky and I never saw them. I only saw Vietnamese."

She kept her thoughts to herself, as she did after the war when she met up with relatives in Ho Chi Minh City (as Saigon was renamed) and realized that the defeated were better off than the victors. By then, she was organizing artistic events in the city of Hue. When she was 30, she returned to Hanoi to work in the government's movie industry. "I wrote five screenplays which were made into bad films," she said, "but I couldn't live off my salary."